ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the differing roles of festivals as they have been symbolically conceptualised. It provides an overview of the origins of festival culture and practice, with reference to rites and rituals, then considers how festivals constitute social relations. Festivals can function as both a form of social integration and cohesion as well as sites of dispute and protest – and these conflicting ways of framing the event often occur concurrently. Four key terms here are communitas, liminality, carnivalesque and festivalisation. The chapter goes on to consider how these are connected both to the notion of encounter and to broader social concerns.
